Documentaries prove highlight

Sold-out crowd packs ND Student Film Festival.

Sold-out crowd packs ND Student Film Festival.

January 21, 2006|JEREMY D. BONFIGLIO Tribune Staff Writer

SOUTH BEND -- Documentary. Drama. Comedy. At Friday's opening-night screening of the 17th annual Notre Dame Student Film Festival, a sold-out audience in the DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts discovered 12 short movies that made them think, laugh and applaud. Each film, which also will be screened today and Sunday, brings a high level of artistic and technical merit, while the order of the films provide good pacing in length, genre and quality. It is the documentaries, however, that once again anchor this festival. "Two Dollar Ride," by Jan Wohrle and Lyndsey Grunewald, and "Everyone Here" by Hatti Lim and Rob Shelley offer a bit of after-hours grit. "Two Dollar Ride," follows South Bend cabbie "Super" Dave Noble as he shares off-color jokes and wisdom to inebriated college students. Wohrle and Grunewald avoid judgments in this intimate portrait, and still allow Noble's eccentricities to unfold. Hatti Lim and Rob Shelley find the right balance of songs and interviews in "Everyone Here," a documentary about South Bend's underground music scene. Subjects Nate Trimboli and the band Squirm offer an insider's guide to an incestuous music scene. Two other documentaries, "Layer 18,653" and "Skiing for Love," are more comedic in tone and content. Eric Houston, Ryan Rogers and Jimmy O'Connell discover the quirky Carmichael family, creators of the World's Largest Ball of Paint in "Layer 18,653." The filmmakers revel in the object's oddity (and the audience responded Friday night) but, at times, the film tries too hard to sustain the joke, and mocks the Carmichaels far too easily. Dan Young, however, only mocks himself in "Skiing for Love." Along with filmmaking partners Rob Tenniswood and Jim Moran, the film follows Young's quest to the Swiss Valley slopes for a lesson in skiing and wooing the ladies. Of the dramatic films, "Case History" stood out. John Klein and Mike Molenda offer a bleak portrait of a priest and teacher accused of visiting a child pornography Web site. The film makes good cinematic use of theatrical settings, props and lighting to aptly support the poignant dialogue of a man ostracized by the public and left in limbo by the church. "M&M in the Middle," by Michael Crocker and Mikala Engel offers some comic relief to the high drama. It chronicles a cupcake marriage proposal that goes awry, and was a clear audience favorite. Not all films were a hit. Although "Senior-Etta" is a brave attempt at the American musical genre and garnered its share of laughs, it inevitably suffers from strained lyrics and forced scenarios, while the drama "Childhood" falters in the physical and emotional weakness of unsympathetic characters. Still, as a collection, the films were more than worth the $6 price of admission. In fact, they were a bargain.